Superpower Vacuum June 24, 2026June 23, 2026 Superpower Vacuum—and the Broligarchs’ Plan to Fill It If someone told you in 2016 that within a decade, Russia would lose a war to Ukraine and the United States would lose a war to Iran, you would have likely thought them insane. Nevertheless . . . Putin’s dream of a Russian Empire stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Germany seems far less likely at this point than Putin being brought down by his own hubris. And the long project of America’s far-right to destroy “globalism,” continuing with Trump’s dismantling of U.S. soft power, has left us isolated, weak, and vulnerable. If nature abhors a vacuum, and the superpowers that took up so much space in the geopolitical order are shrinking, who will fill this yawning chasm? Well, the broligarchs have a plan . . . And I’m guessing you will not like it. On a brighter note: Take heart. The tide is turning. When we rise up in protest, we win. Listen to Monday’s Maddow.
Thwarting Their Plans June 23, 2026June 22, 2026 How the Trump administration plans to interfere with the 2026 elections: ♦ Deceive ♦ Disrupt ♦ Deny Click that link and join Thursday’s call to find out what you can do about it. We’re gonna win. Maybe even in Idaho! There, Andrew Yang tells us, Todd Achilles is running as an Independent against an 83-year-old incumbent who hasn’t held a town hall in 18 years. Until he resigned to run for the Senate, Todd was a Democratic state legislator appointed by the Republican governor*. He’s an MBA with impressive military service followed by corporate experience. Though he’s pledged not to caucus with either party, that’s fine by me. *Andrew mis-typed. THIS IS GOING TO SELL 5 ZILLION COPIES Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (Tina Brown’s review.)
It’s Catching On June 22, 2026June 22, 2026 But first . . . In response to President Obama’s remarks linked to Friday, Carl — who constantly defends Trump — sent me a truly nasty opinion piece about the new Obama Presidential Center. He’s upset that it has cost $850 million, paid for mostly by generous donors who’ve asked for nothing in return. Contrast that with Trump’s $600+ million gold ballroom. One is a 19-acre campus that has rejuvenated a neighborhood and will help to educate and inspire millions of visitors each year; the other, a space to be enjoyed by just a few thousand of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful . . . funded at least in part by people expecting, and often getting, enormous financial rewards. With Strait of Hormuz held hostage, Trump’s Iran deal is worse than Obama’s. Duh. And now . . . LEAVING MAGA From Spokane to Mar-A-Lago, Lancaster or Des Moines, it’s catching on. People are making their own signs. A citizen someplace posted this one to Facebook: Consider: He said he’d bring prices down, end the war on Day One, start no new ones, provide “great health care at a tiny fraction of the price,” rid the country of the “worst of the worst” — it had undeniable appeal. But people beginning to have doubts. Did he really win the 2020 election in a landslide, as he insists? (And was the crowd at his 2017 inauguration really larger than Obama’s?) Is there really nothing to the 38,000 mentions of his name in the heavily redacted Epstein files thus far released? Were the two juries really wrong in finding against him in the E. Jean Carroll trials (and was the judge really wrong in characterizing what he did to her as “rape”)? Are his tariffs really paid by foreign countries rather American importers and consumers? Was it really right to pardon all the convicted January 6 felons? Was it really right to move Epstein’s accomplice to a more comfortable prison and wish her well? What about giving Elon Musk a chainsaw, which he then handed to a 19-year-old named Big Balls? What about setting back the medical research that could have one day saved your life or mine? Or cutting health care in order to ease the tax burden on billionaires? Is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., really the right man to override the scientific community on vaccine policy? Is a cage match on the White House lawn really the way to celebrate what’s best about America? Is insulting our allies really the best way to win friends around the world? Was it really wise — or humane — to cut off aid to starving children and, in other ways, jettison the “soft power” we had accumulated over 80 years? Was the 2.7% inflation rate he inherited from Biden really “the worst inflation in history?” Was the Biden economy — termed “the envy of the world” by The Economist — really “a disaster?” Is climate change really a hoax? Was it really a good idea to use taxpayer dollars to halt privately-funded projects that would have provided clean wind energy? Is a Fox News weekend co-host really the right choice to lead the Pentagon? What about his firing top officers for no reason, seemingly, other than their being women or black? Is it really okay to make billions off the presidency . . . to use the Justice Department to attack people your enemies . . . to demolish part of the White House without consulting Congress . . . to watch for hours as your most ardent fans attack the Capitol, ignoring urgent pleas to call them off? Do we really want our children growing up seeing this president as a role model? People are beginning to have doubts. You’ve by now seen the SNL skit, I’m sure: the mom who’s beginning to have doubts. We should welcome these moms and dads warmly and without judgment. Some will stick with their leader even as he walks down Fifth Avenue shooting people. He said so himself. Others have begun to have doubts. And some of those folks are leavingMAGA.
Pro-Coal, Anti-Diversity, a Question — and a Bonus! June 19, 2026 PRO-COAL With Trump paying $765 million more of your tax dollars to cancel yet 4 more wind projects, Paul Krugman affirms just how crushingly dumb this is. PRO-MEASELS Senator Michael Bennet v RFK, Jr. (36 seconds). (If you have time, the 2-minute version.) ANTI-DIVERSITY Oops, We Invited Nazis to Our Christian Nationalist Conference. Of special note today, Juneteenth. QUESTION At what point will Republicans in Congress recognize — and act on — the peril a continued Trump regime puts us in? My guess is: never. Which is why it’s so imperative to have a HUGE blue wave five months from now. And then to impeach and convict him, not least for failing to obey the law requiring release of the Epstein files. By January 2027, it’s conceivable that enough Republican senators would join the Democratic majority to reach the required two-thirds — the same two-thirds we would have had 5 years ago if then-majority leader Mitch McConnell hadn’t punted. Read his explanation here, in case you’ve forgotten how damning of Trump it was. BONUS!!! President Obama’s remarks at the opening of his Presidential Center. How I wish he — or anyone else on that stage, even, heaven protect us, Bush ’43 — were president today.
Testing My Happy Gene June 18, 2026June 17, 2026 Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail. Perhaps the most depressing book you will ever read. On the plus side: it’s wonderfully short (106 pages). The author argues that it’s basically hopeless, because human nature doesn’t change. Success leads to over-reach and moral decay, which lead to disaster. But what’s the point of buying into that, even if it does seem ever more likely with every news cycle? I have the happy gene. We’re going to win! And maybe Claude will save us. Click that for a three-minute conversation between a human and Claude, which — assuming this is real — turns out to be some combination of poetic, surprising, and profound. Or so it seemed to me. Computing power has sure come a long way since I first played Pong. Or maybe Anthony Scaramucci is right (90 seconds), and Trump’s outrageous depravity will lead to a reckoning and renewal. It happens, he says, every 80 years. BANANA FEEDBACK Richard F.: “What a temptation! Disclosure: The banana is our official household fruit, so I have many thoughts. Bananas Foster: The entire concept needs standardization. We used to frequent the Eddie V in San Diego. Great bananas Foster. Not so for Eddie V in Scottsdale. Different recipe, only OK at best. Banananomics: Free bananas from Amazon. Pricing: A 43:1 ratio.” With regard to Mark P’s Bananas Gabrielle, I’m skeptical. Peeling an exceedingly ripe banana would be something of a challenge!” → Nothing great in life comes easy. EPSTEIN Still nothing? What are they trying to hide? Why doesn’t Congress impeach and convict him for flouting a law that he himself signed that passed Congress just one vote shy of unanimously?
Bananas! June 17, 2026June 17, 2026 But first . . . Remember how Stacey Abrams did the impossible, organizing Georgia to elect Reverend Warnock and John Ossoff to the United States Senate? She had help, of course; but she was the driving force. Now she’s launching 10 Steps to Freedom & Power. The 10 Steps to Autocracy and Authoritarianism These steps don’t happen in order—they occur simultaneously to overwhelm and confuse opposition. Recognize them. Resist them. Reverse them . . . Which are followed directly by . . . The 10 Steps to Freedom and Power Defeating authoritarianism isn’t a cinematic moment – it’s thousands of individual, community and institutional actions that are stronger and more consistent than those who would oppress us. You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t need permission. You just need to start. Start where you are. With what you have. Among those you know. Together, we can build something stronger than fear. We build a better democracy. We build freedom. We build power . . . You’ll be one of the first to explore this site and the resources it offers to help you engage. Knowing, Stacey, you’ll soon have a lot of company. Also . . . JOBS & DEBT Democrats create them. Republicans . . . not so much (2 minutes worth sharing). Where modern Republicans have excelled is in creating debt by cutting taxes on the ultra-wealthy. When Nixon/Ford left office, the National Debt was equal to 34.6% of GDP. Jimmy Carter had cut it to 31.7% by the time he handed the reins to Ronald Reagan and Bush 41, who had ballooned it to 63.4% by the time they handed it to Bill Clinton, who lowered it to 54.5% . . . . . . only to see Bush 43 pump it up to 82.2% and hand Obama a potential depression that required massive fiscal stimulus to avert, raising the ratio to 103.9% . . . though, of note, it was shrinking by the time he handed Trump a booming economy that required no stimulus. Trump nonetheless ballooned the ratio to 127.9% and handed Biden COVID. COVID notwithstanding, Biden shrank it to 122.9% before handing Trump an economy that was the envy of the world — and thus, again, in no need of stimulus. Yet less than two years in, Trump 47 already has it up past 130% and growing fast. Executive summary: If you want a lot of job, vote blue. If you want a huge National Debt, vote red. And now . . . BANANAS This isn’t about SPCX and its preposterous $2.5 trillion valuation — though that, too. It’s Mark P.‘s reaction to Monday’s Freezing Bananas. Mark writes: Speaking of bananas: I invented a banana recipe years ago and named it after my daughter: Bananas Gabrielle. Several chefs I have shared it with were blown away “Take an EXCEEDINGLY ripe banana, peel it, cut into one-inch sections, microwave on high for two minutes, and serve” – that’s it. Microwaving boils all the water out of it and caramelizes the sugar. You can serve it over vanilla ice cream as “Bananas Foster” — but it requires NO sugar or butter. Same classic New Orleans dessert with 10 per cent of the calories. Try it! And let me know what you think. Oh, and wait! EPSTEIN 38,000 mentions . . . why all the redactions if there’s nothing to hide? Any news?
Freezing Bananas June 15, 2026June 15, 2026 But first . . . LINDSEY GRAHAM I totally love this (two and a half minutes you may want to share). Go, Annie, go! TWO PHILOSOPHIES OF LIFE “Be kind and be useful.” — Obama Be brutal and be selfish. — Trump (I put the first in quotes because it is, I’ve read, the exact mantra he drilled into Malia and Sasha as they were growing up. The second I have simply inferred from yesterday’s cage match and, well, from everything else he’s ever done.) BANANAS It’s been years, I think, since I last posted a recipe from Cooking Like A Guy, my not-yet-published cookbook. (I’m waiting for Hollywood to option the movie rights.) But this one is just too good to withhold. Freeze bananas. (Especially good if you’d otherwise wind up wasting them.) Grab one out of the freezer the next day or the next week or the next month and leave it out for half an hour or so, until it gets all sweaty on the outside. Cut it in half with a sharp knife. Grip the left half at the end with your left hand; with your right hand, squeeze the banana, an inch or so at a time, into your mouth. Compost the peel . . . and repeat with the other half. Nothing to wash or clean up. No sugar added. Or artificial anything. Or wasteful packaging. The ultimate banana gelato on a hot summer day. (Speaking of cold summer fruit, see also How to De-seed A Watermelon.)
They’re leaving MAGA June 13, 2026June 12, 2026 Former MAGA zealot Rich Logis received this yesterday: Hello! I live in Springfield Missouri and saw your billboard next to a Maverick and was amazed by it. Missouri is an extremely MAGA state and seeing something like this was a breath of fresh air knowing how toxic the MAGA community is. I went to your website and was touched by all of the stories and the impact you guys are having on people’s lives. This is truly an awesome representation of what it’s like to be a true American and helping others around you without shaming them. I cannot thank you enough for creating such a website and support team for people. Separately, Rich blasted this email: The Villages, a retirement community of about 150,000 people in central Florida, was once called “The New Headquarters for Make America Great Again” by Fox News. . . . a community so red that in both 2016 and 2020, Trump took more than 70% of the vote in Sumter County — the county The Villages calls home. But recently, that’s been changing. The Villages Democratic Club has nearly doubled its membership since 2020, neighbors who kept their Harris lawn signs tucked away are finding each other, and in March, The Villages held its largest anti-Trump protest ever, with local media estimating nearly 7,000 residents turning out against him. And this week, thanks to the support of people like you, we put a Leaving MAGA billboard up in The Villages. . . . Read in full to see how LeavingMAGA plays a meaningful role in saving democracy. WEEKEND BONUS 1946 Birthed Three Presidents — And Remade the World. “For better and worse.”
Semi-Corrections June 12, 2026 MOZART Randy W.: “Mozart WASN’T bured in a pauper’s grave. He made quite a bit of money from his music.” → Apparently, he did — yet died more or less penniless. EINSTEIN Rob N.: “Yes, Einstein died with just $65,000. While not a huge amount of money back then, the value today would be about $825,000. Not a fortune — but not exactly broke.” → Fair. But still. INEQUALITY Marcus W.: “I read your thoughts about wealth inequality. It’s not that simple. See: What Liberals Get Wrong About the Middle Class.” → The middle class is shrinking, the authors say, but so is the proportion of Americans below the middle class — because the upper-middle class is growing. Then again, wealth inequality has become grotesque. As of 2022, they report, the share of wealth held by the middle class had fallen to 8% from 24% in 1989, while the share held by the top 3% rose from 26% in 1989 to 53% in 2022 — and has surely only grown more unequal since then. Join the Patriotic Millionaires, if you are one — or their grassroots arm if you’re not! HEGSETH: PREMEDITATED MURDER Top Pentagon Official Admits Boat Strike May Have Killed Victims of Human Trafficking. Worth reading. I believe you will conclude Hegseth intended to kill all aboard; that most were likely not drug smugglers; that even suspected drug smugglers deserve a fair trial; that, if convicted, deserve something less than the death penalty; that drug smugglers on a small boat heading away from the United States pose no threat to the United States that would warrant their execution. (And that murdering the two final passengers, clinging to their capsized boat, is the very definition of a war crime — look it up.) Hegseth should be fired and tried as a war criminal.
Winning In Maine; Losing in New York June 11, 2026 SOLD ON GRAHAM PLATNER Watch a minute of his victory speech and/or his interview yesterday on Morning Joe. Trey Beck believes he will win — and should. Me, too. BOOED — BIGLY Adam Kinzinger: Here’s an uncomfortable fact that we all need to accept: this president can’t handle the truth. And that keeps me up at night. Moments before tip-off at Game 3 of the NBA Finals Monday evening, the cameras inside Madison Square Garden found Donald Trump in James Dolan’s private suite, high above the court, as Avery Wilson began to sing the national anthem. The president stood with his granddaughter Kai beside him, his right hand raised in a slow salute, his jaw set in the particular way it gets when he is trying to look presidential. And then, as it always does, the crowd told the truth. The boos started the moment his face appeared on the jumbotron and did not stop for a full minute. Not scattered boos. A sustained, unified wall of sound from 19,812 people who had paid thousands of dollars to watch a basketball game and found themselves, instead, sending a message to the man who had turned their neighborhood into a security checkpoint for the evening. The watch party outside the arena had been canceled. Several blocks of midtown Manhattan had been closed. Thousands of fans had been rerouted, delayed, and searched extensively. The city had been inconvenienced for a man the city did not want there. And it said so, loudly, the only way it could. The jeers ended when the flag filled the screen. They returned when Trump’s face appeared again. And they evaporated entirely when Jalen Brunson was shown standing on the court, because the crowd had not come to Madison Square Garden on a Monday night to make a political statement. They had come to watch the Knicks. Donald Trump made that impossible. Somewhere in the second half, the cameras caught the president with his eyes closed. His head had dropped slightly. His shoulders had settled in the way that bodies settle when the muscles holding them upright have given up the effort. The White House, which has developed considerable experience explaining away photographs of this kind, later described it as a long blink. It was not a long blink. It was a 79-year-old man who had fallen asleep at a basketball game he had forced his way into. The Knicks lost for the first time in the series. The crowd was deflated. The building emptied. And somewhere in the motorcade back to JFK, the president prepared to tell the world what had happened. Standing on the tarmac before boarding Air Force One, Trump was asked directly about the reception he had received. He did not hesitate. “I thought it was great,” he said. “I mean, I thought it was amazing, actually. You mean when they had the camera on me? I thought it was very good, yeah. It was certainly amazing. It was, I think, mostly cheers. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic.” I want to be careful here, because the temptation when reporting something like this is to treat it as simply another lie in an administration that tells many of them. But I do not think that is what Monday night was. Lies, by definition, require some awareness of the truth being obscured. What Trump described on that tarmac did not sound like a man who knew he had been booed and was covering it up. It sounded like a man who had genuinely processed the evening differently from everyone else in the building. The pool reporter from The Washington Times, not exactly a hostile outlet, wrote that Trump was thunderously booed. The video is unambiguous. The audio is clear. None of that appears to have registered. At 2:11 in the morning, unable to sleep, Trump posted to Truth Social. He shared a clip from a conservative news site showing his motorcade driving through the city, with a handful of supporters cheering along the route. A Fox News contributor had captioned it: “NYC loves Donald Trump.” In the same clip, plainly audible, New Yorkers were booing as the motorcade rolled past. He posted it anyway, because to him, that was the night. That was what had happened. The cheers were real. The boos did not exist in any way that required acknowledgment. I have been writing about this presidency for a long time now, and the question I find myself returning to, more than any other, is not whether Trump lies. He does, constantly, and the documentation of that is overwhelming. The question that keeps me up at night is something more unsettling: how much of what he says does he actually believe? Because there is a meaningful difference between a president who knows the truth and hides it, and a president who has lost the capacity to distinguish between what he experiences and what he wishes he had experienced. The first is a problem of character. The second is something else. Consider what that operating system looks like applied to the decisions that actually matter. The CIA delivered an assessment telling the White House that Iran has restored 90 percent of its missile capability after two months of war and $30 billion in spending. Trump called the reporting virtual treason. His approval rating has collapsed to the low thirties. He describes a country that loves him. Inflation hit 3.8 percent in April. His economic team told CNBC that Americans are simply overwhelmed by winning. Nineteen thousand people booed him during the national anthem at Madison Square Garden. He went home and posted that New York City loves him. This is not a new pattern. But something about Monday night made it impossible to look away from, precisely because sports arenas are one of the last places in American life where reality is genuinely non-negotiable. The score is the score. The crowd noise is the crowd noise. You cannot spin a jumbotron. Thousands of people had their phones out. The audio exists on a thousand separate recordings, uploaded to a thousand separate accounts within minutes of it happening. There is no version of that evening in which the president was not booed, and no version of his response to it that made sense given what everyone in that building heard and felt. What I keep coming back to is the granddaughter. Kai Trump sat beside her grandfather in that suite for the whole of it. She heard what the crowd said when his face appeared on the screen. She watched the game. She watched him close his eyes. She was there on the tarmac when he described the night as mostly cheers. And she is seventeen years old, growing up inside the particular reality her grandfather has constructed, learning from the closest possible distance what it looks like when a man decides that the world around him must conform to his version of events rather than the other way around. I don’t know what she took away from Monday night. I hope it was something honest. Because the rest of us don’t have the option of looking away from what it means when the person making decisions about a war, an economy, and a democracy comes home from a basketball game and tells the world it was mostly cheers. It wasn’t. And we all heard it. – Rep Adam Kinzinger IF EINSTEIN WAS SO SMART . . . James D Scurlock: Churchill was broke his entire life, ditto for Vincent Van Gogh. Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave because he never made enough for a proper burial. Despite his brilliance, Albert Einstein’s estate was worth just $65,000 when he died. Have a great day.